Using JIRA for Project Management
At Rainbow we use JIRA, a decent Bug Tracking/Project Management software. JIRA is great for software developers and project managers,but it isn't the tool for the normal end user.
As noted earlier, Rainbow users should be encouraged to look at documentation, mailing lists, forums. If they can't get help from the community, one of the Rainbow Support people should see whether its a serious problem and needs to be taken to JIRA.
JIRA will be used only for internal issues and tasks. I feel that end users shouldn't have to log
into a system to get their problems looked at. The forums and the mailing lists play a decent role.
1. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rainbowportal : General place to ask questions.
2. http://community.rainbowportal.net : More focused areas for Rainbow help.
I've added the 5 main teams to the system. Right now, we are working by taking what we see as the things that need to get done and starting on it. This is great, but we also need a way to track all important pending tasks. There are going to be two sources of work in JIRA, work we create for our self, and work that is going to come up in the form of patches, bugs, or circumstances.
I am going to use JIRA to create and assign my self tasks and get them done one by one. If the work can be split between a few people, it'll be easy to hand the task to someone else and let them continue on it.
JIRA tickets have a place to put comments on every update. For those of us who can't be online at the sametime as others, it will be a good way to see where a task is.